[Whiteboard-subscribers] Whiteboard Report #130, 2/6/08
Brad Edmondson
brade at lightlink.com
Wed Feb 6 12:07:36 EST 2008
NSDL WHITEBOARD REPORT #130
February 6, 2008
Whiteboard Report news is on the Web at http://NSDL.org and http://
expertvoices.nsdl.org/whiteboardtalkback. Back issues are available
at http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/Issue--Archive.php.
NEWS
Teaching the Feb. 20 Lunar Eclipse
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/highlights
A total lunar eclipse will be visible in North America on February
20th beginning at 8:43 pm Eastern and 5:43 pm Pacific time. This
prime-time celestial show should be an excellent teaching opportunity
for young astronomers, and several good web resources are available.
NASA's "Official Eclipse Home Page" is the most extensive, with
downloadable diagrams for each time zone, a full discussion of
conditions and special circumstances for this event, and a good set
of links. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
Institute's site has a good one-page Frequent Questions sheet. And
Sky and Telescope magazine has a guide to all four visible eclipses
that will happen in 2008, including a total solar eclipse on August 1
that will run in a narrow swath from the Canadian Arctic to Mongolia.
If that isn't your ideal vacation, just wait -- the next total solar
eclipse visible in North America is scheduled for August 21, 2017.
New BEN Resources
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/pathwaysnews
The number of peer-reviewed educational resources in NSDL’s
Biological Sciences Pathway (BEN) portal recently expanded by more
than 20 percent. Among the 1,500 new items are lessons, laboratory
exercises, journals, multimedia, and online interactive pages like
the Video and Image Data Access (VIDA) collection for Science and
Inquiry during Teacher Preparation. These are 199 annotated science
video and images with content and language appropriate for K-8
science. A VIDA resource called Main Zones of the Intertidal Zone
shows an area of the Central California coast where the tides rise
and fall daily, alternatively submerging and exposing the shore to
ocean water. The images discuss the important characteristics of each
zone, and a link to the NSDL Strand Map system allows users to relate
the resource to national educational standards and benchmarks.
Descriptions of the new BEN resources will be posted each week on the
NSDL Pathways News blog.
Teachers Domain Polar Resources
http://www.teachersdomain.org/exhibits/ipy07-ex/index.html
The new Polar Sciences Collection from Teachers’ Domain was funded by
NSF as an education activity of the International Polar Year. Twenty
new resources have been added, along with links to supplemental
resources that are already on Teachers Domain. Nearly all the new
resources are available in the site's Open Educational Resources
section for public download and reuse. “We hope that these materials
will help bring polar sciences into classrooms across the country and
help to focus attention on the importance of the work taking place
during International Polar Year,” says Ted Sicker, PI of Teachers’
Domain, an NSDL Pathways project. “We plan to expand the special
collection later this year with the 40 new resources we’ll be
developing as part of another NSF-funded project called Engaging
Alaska Natives in the Geosciences.”
Flower Bulb Science
http://www.thebulbproject.com
http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/NSDL2/
webseminar8.aspx
There is nothing like a pot of tulips in the middle of winter to
inspire young scientists. The Bulb Project is a new website that
shows K-12 educators how to use flower bulbs to teach science, art,
and history. It is also the subject of the next NSDL Web Seminar
Series, which will be presented on Thursday, February 7th from
6:30-8:30 pm Eastern time. Marcia Eames-Sheavly of Cornell’s Garden-
Based Learning Program and others will explain the tricks of teaching
students how to force bulbs out of season, control how tall the
plants grow, create a digital collage, or spell out hidden messages
on a lawn. Free pre-registration is required through the NSTA
Learning Center.
NSDL at AAAS
http://www.aaas.org/meetings
It is not too late to register online for the Annual Meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to be
held February 14-19 in Boston. You can also register in person. NSDL
will be featured in two conference sessions on Sunday the 17th in
Room 209 of the Hynes Convention Center. Faculty Collaborative Online
Tools and Projects: Lessons from the NSDL is scheduled for 8:30 am,
and at 2:15 pm NSDL will hold a Digital Resource Showcase for K-12
Science Education. Both sessions are free and open to the public (no
registration required). Come and share ideas with representatives
from many NSDL partners. For more information, contact Robert Payo
(rpayo AT ucar.edu).
BOOKMARKS
Journalism In Your Pajamas
www.computational-journalism.com
The spreadsheet, word processor, web browser, digital audio and
video, and blogs have all become valuable tools of journalism. Now
Web 2.0 has forever altered the nature of software innovation, while
at the same time the news industry undergoes historic change. The
first meeting on Computational Journalism, Feb 22-23 at the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta, will bring together researchers
and newsroom types, plus a freelancer or two who works at home in
their pajamas. Half the seats are reserved for students and early-
career folks in research, technology, and journalism.
Call For Community Sourcing Proposals
http//www.ja-sig.org/conferences/08spring/index.html
February 22 is the proposal deadline for the spring conference of JA-
SIG, an organization that promotes the use of open technology
architectures and systems in higher education. Higher Education
Solutions: The Community Source Way will be held April 28-30 in St.
Paul, Minnesota. JA-SIG is looking for session leaders on the topics
of community source management and governance, design and
development, and deployment and integration. Special emphasis will be
given to presentations that span multiple projects or audience types.
To submit a 500-word abstract online, click the link at the
conference’s home page.
Apply for BEN Scholars Program
http://www.biosciednet.org/portal/about/benScholars.php
NSDL’s Biological Sciences Pathway (BEN) invites undergraduate
faculty in the biological sciences to apply to the BEN Scholars
Program before March 11, 2008. The goal of the program is to promote
the use of digital library resources and student-centered teaching
and learning methods in biological sciences lecture and laboratory
courses, and in research training programs. BEN Scholars receive
training in leadership and the effective use of digital libraries;
resources to use in their own classrooms and to share with
colleagues; travel support; and a small stipend. A National
Leadership Training Institute is scheduled for July 9-12, 2008 in
Washington, D.C. Questions may be directed to Shelia Clark (sclark AT
aaas.org).
Call for JCDL Tutorials
http://www.jcdl2008.org/calltutorials.html
The annual meeting of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
(JCDL), Bridging Culture, Bridging Technology, will be held in
Pittsburgh, PA on June 16-20. Friday February 8 is the deadline for
tutorial proposals. Half-day and full-day tutorials should provide in-
depth coverage of a single subject supporting one or more of the main
conference themes. Proposals must include a title and short abstract
plus a one paragraph definition of learning objectives, a minimum and
maximum number of participants, the length of the tutorial, the
target audience, and presenter bios. The title and abstract should
be written to attract the target audience, since these components
will appear in the conference program. For further information,
contact Carl Lagoze (lagoze AT cs.cornell.edu) or Sandy Payette
(payette AT cs.cornell.edu).
OpeniWorld:Europe2008
http://www.openiworld.org/Europe2008
OpeniWorld’s first European event will be held in Lyon, France on
June 24-27. Co-sponsored by the Lyon 2 University and MIT’s Open
Knowledge Initiative, OpeniWorld will be concerned with resource
federation, one of today’s key educational technology challenges.
Federation offers much promise for inter-institutional collaboration
towards more effective learning as well as significant market
opportunities for providers and consumers of educational content and
software. Proposals for papers and the Technology Showcase are due
February 22.
Ontology Summit Begins Thursday
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_02_07
In philosophy, ontology refers to the study of conceptions of reality
and the nature of being. In information science, ontology refers to
a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and
the relationships between those concepts. Learn more at online events
that will launch Ontology Summit 2008, a joint initiative by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Ontolog, and the
National Center for Ontological Research. Three months of open online
discourse will begin with a conference call on Thursday February 7
and culminate with a two-day workshop April 28-29 at Gaithersburg,
MD. If you want to participate, please e-mail Peter Yim (peter.yim
AT cim3.com) before the call.
INSPIRATION
YouTube Delivers One Million Möbius Fans
http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/moebius
Möbius Transformations Revealed is a short video by Douglas Arnold
and Jonathan Rogness, two mathematicians at the University of
Minnesota. It depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations, and it
shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity.
It was one of the winners in the 2007 Science and Visualization
Challenge and was featured along with the other winning entries in
the September 28, 2007 issue of journal Science. The video, which was
first released on YouTube in June 2007, has been watched there by
more than a million viewers so far.
NSDL Whiteboard Report describes research, news, and notes from the
National Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Education Digital
Library (http://NSDL.org), which is funded by the National Science
Foundation. Whiteboard is published bi-weekly and includes
information from NSDL projects and programs nationwide. Please
redistribute. To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit http://nsdl.org/
publications/?pager=signup.
Whiteboard Report is edited by Brad Edmondson (gbe2 at cornell.edu).
Project leaders and participants from the NSDL community are
encouraged to send research news and notes of interest. Please limit
these items to 200 words and provide web links to additional
information.
The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is the nation's online
library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics education and research. NSDL would like to thank the
National Science Foundation for its generous support and advocacy of
NSDL as the NSF digital library of science education. This material
is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under
Grants No. 0227648, 0424671, and 0227888. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those
of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation.
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